[MacLeans.ca] It used to be simpler: Jews vs. neo-Nazis? Muslims vs. Steyn? Gays vs. Christians? Easy calls all. The last time gays, B & Bs and the "human rights" commission were in the news was a couple of years back, when Dagmar and Arnost Cepica closed their bed and breakfast rather than comply with a P.E.I. HRC ruling that they rent the room to a homosexual couple. We all knew who to root for back then: obviously if the uptight squaresville Christian couple are that hung up on the godless sodomites going at it like the clappers in their premium rental unit they shouldn't be in the B & B business at all.What goes around comes around. But, in the dog-bites-gay case, the upshot seems to be that persons with sinusitis no longer enjoy the human right to run a B & B. Which may not seem a big deal, but is certainly at odds with the "human rights" establishment's deference to say, Micheline Montreuil, the transgendered lawyer and serial plaintiff against the Canadian Forces and other transphobic putative employers. But what it ultimately portends is the death of "public accommodation," the concept by which the state claims the right to regulate what goes on in your health club or restaurant. As many readers point out, we homophobic Islamophobic haters are a dying breed: any day now I'm bound to keel over from a massive stroke, and thereafter gays, Muslims and Seeing Eye dogs will gambol and frolic in harmony throughout the peaceable kingdom. Yet the shifting hierarchies of multiculturalism are not too hard to discern: in Britain, an educational establishment gung-ho about forcing the kindergartners of evangelical Christians to be taught the joys of same-sex marriage crumbled in nothing flat when Muslim parents in Bristol objected. If it's a choice between Heather Has Two Mommies or Heather Has Four Mommies And A Big Bearded Daddy Who Wants To Marry Her Off To A Cousin Back In Pakistan, bet on the latter. Any gay couple or blind man with a Seeing Eye dog who takes on a Muslim bed-and-breakfast proprietor will get short shrift from the "human rights" commission. The OHRC is currently champing at the bit to force gay altar servers on Ontario Catholics. At the local mosque, no imam need worry about such state encroachments on religion.
The "human rights" bureaucracy has had a grand run sticking it to Christians and other unfashionable groups. The internal contradictions of the rainbow coalition will prove harder to negotiate.